Recent Articles

Recently, we limited the length of posts made by commentards to 2000 characters. We did this for no better reason than that the 2000 characters had always been our publicly announced limit, and we thought that we should do what we said on the tin.

So we waited for the dust to settle. Not terribly popular ... and so 10,000 characters are back, with a slight twist. In response to some commentard suggestions we now presenting long posts with a gradual fade out and an option to expand. You can see it in action in this story.

As well as revising long post handling we have introduced a few layout tweaks on posting pages, These include: more space for the content, new buttons, "report" moved top right to de-emphasise a rarely used facility, better support for longer usernames, and perhaps most contentiously, a curvy arrow bar for replies.

This replaces the long thick grey bar. Neither reply option is optimal, but then our single-level semi-threaded layout is not optimal either. We know the answer is to adopt full-blown threading but this may take us some time to put in to practice.

Commentards are already challenging us over the changes at our new user forums. So I have decided to switch off comments for this story and invite you to join in the fun developing at this reader-started topic: New Forum Wishlist. ®